Subject:
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Re: Arkham Asylum - A cool set, but a bit disturbing.
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 8 Jun 2007 06:53:13 GMT
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Viewed:
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8041 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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For the good/evil struggle thing to work, it is the innocent who must
suffer.
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Ah! But that’s the difference between melodrama and drama. The more
sophistimacated challenge is for the reader/viewer to be made to sympathize
with a villain rather than always rooting for the innocent victim.
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And that, my friend, may be one of those “nutshell” differences between a
liberal and a conservative. Assuming you are serious with your assertion
(sophistimacated?), I challenge your notion that the concept of sympathizing
with the villian is a more sophisticated rendition of drama. I will never
understand the left’s fascination with evil, as if it can be analyzed and
understood. Dwelling in evil doesn’t provide insight or understanding, but
it does taint and corrupt those who choose to get too close to it. You lie
down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
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First off, “sophistimacated” was just a means of letting out some air so that I
don’t start taking myself too seriously.
Let me disclaim that it in this passage I’m speaking specifically of fiction
rather than reality.
The reason it’s more sophisticated (which, in this context, implies only
complexity rather than an objectively “better” or “worse” aesthetic sensibility)
because it requires the viewer to make achieve more complicated degree of
pathos. Sympathizing with an innocent victim is sort of easy because we’re
culturally programmed to do so (“women and children first,” etc.) In western
culture, at least, it’s basically the default position. To sympathize with the
innocent victim, the viewer need do (practically) nothing other than to watch
and react. But to sympathize with a villain, the viewer has to be drawn out of
his default mode and given a reason to sympathize.
I may have portrayed it simply as a matter of choosing to sympathize with the
villain rather than the victim, but that’s not really the idea. Instead, the
drama must be framed in such a way that one’s sympathy for a villain is
justified by the circumstances.
I’m also not talking about feeling sympathy for a villain who’s being held
accountable for his villainy; I don’t feel bad for the murderer who’s
incarcerated for life, for example.
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In the final attempts to analyze evil, where does it get one? At best,
genuine sympathy for the evildoer, and what good can come from that?
Tolerance? Great. Let’s learn to tolerate evildoers. My suspicion is that
the purpose of such endeavors is to discover how stinky someone else’s
laundry is, so as to feel good about the fetor of their own. Good old
relative moralism!
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I prefer the term “moral relativism,” if you please!
It should be reiterated that I don’t believe in “evil” as an actual, absolute
thing, so the most I can say is that, when possible, it improves one’s
understanding to study those behaviors in others that are so abhorrent to me
that I would characterize them as “evil,” but I don’t thereby presume to have
any ability to diagnose “evil” in an absolute sense.
And the value of studying such a person is that I might gain an understanding of
what drives him to act as he does. That’s more complicated than speechifying
and sloganizing about the “axis of evil” and “evildoers who want to kill life”
and so on, but ultimately I think that it would be more useful in fostering
peace than would firebombing a city full of civilians, for example.
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IMO once the guy is strapped
down (or otherwise rendered harmless) then his jailer has no business or
right to inflict further harm upon him. We’ve had this discussion before,
of course, and I’m sure we’ll have it again and again. But in brief, it’s
not a question of “innocence” in any absolute sense; the torturer is the
villian and the recipient of the torture is the victim who deserves our
protection.
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What would you say is the reason the victim deserves our protection?
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Why would he not? That is, why would he deserve torture? By what absolute
measure can we say “his evil act justifies these electrodes placed on his
genitals,” I wonder?
Dave!
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